


Tommy's Muse

by terri_testing



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, The characters are not mine, but JKR’s. I expect you knew that.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-05
Updated: 2012-01-05
Packaged: 2019-05-04 07:49:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14588385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/terri_testing/pseuds/terri_testing
Summary: Tommy Riddle had set out to destroy his orphanage rivals that day in the sea cave.Dennis Bishop had been the leader of their year; Amy Benson had been brighter than Tommy.She still is.





	Tommy's Muse

Qualifications and warnings: The characters are not mine, but JKR’s. I expect you knew that.

Other warnings: Violence. Torture. Insanity. Triumph.

This is a horror story, a sequel to my set of drabbles “How I Spent My Summer Holidays, by Tom Marvolo Riddle.” Do not read this if you’re not prepared for horror.

All section quotes (in italics) are taken from Margaret Atwood’s poem, “Marrying the Hangman.”

Those familiar with the poem will take that to be a further warning.

_"These things happen and we sit at a table and tell stories about them so we can finally believe.”_

 

*

 

  
_“Such things cannot happen to us, it is afternoon and these things do not happen in the afternoon.”_

The air smelled of seaweed and fish and sun, strange and exciting to the London brats. Sunlight danced silver over the water. The sea and the air and the light extended everywhere; the land alone was a dark grim wedge far behind them, as the children wandered at the edge of the sparkling, salt-smelling expanse, snatching at shells and pebbles and foam.

 

Dennis had always been the king among the boys, their acknowledged leader. Amy was a pale bookish grub, a worm beneath his feet. Perhaps the one thing they had in common was their fear of Tommy, whom no one, ever, caught actually _doing_ anything. So it was strange that they had somehow wandered off together; it was stranger still that Tommy smiled radiantly at both of them and beckoned. They looked at each other. Neither had any least desire to follow Tom Riddle anywhere. Yet somehow they struggled together up into that dark slit where Tommy shone.

*

_“… their stories, which cannot be believed and which are true.”_

When the matron found them finally, Dennis shook, and vomited, and curled into a ball, mute as a pillbug. Amy told Mrs. Cole, “Nothing happened. I don’t know what happened. Nothing happened!”

She insisted, shrilly, as long as it was light, that nothing had happened.

In the dark, she screamed wordlessly until they finally managed to sedate her.

After a few days, the doctor examined them and both children were taken away. Dennis never did speak again. Amy spoke brightly, quickly, so long as she had light.

It was easier to give her a nightlight than to stop her screaming, the attendants finally decided. Her voice hurt their ears, and she didn’t respond well to drugs

*  
  
_“… there is no escape. There is only a death, indefinitely postponed…”_

Tommy’s cold voice said suddenly, “Hullo, Amy, I’m back.”

She screamed, but she knew that no one would come. They expected her to scream, after all. It was always dark now.

Tommy giggled. “Has anyone ever told you what happened to poor Dennis, that night that you suddenly went blind?”

Chill hands pinned her face. After a moment Tommy giggled louder. “No, I thought that no one would tell you. But you’ll want to know—you liked Dennis, didn’t you? _Everyone_ liked Dennis. You’ll want to know what he did.”

The icy hands waited for Amy’s silent shudder of negation before releasing her.

Tommy must be walking around her now; his voice kept coming from different directions, from everywhere at once. Amy cringed in her restraints, trying to get away. Tommy laughed, his voice rich with satisfaction.

“It was so sad, Amy. You know that he went crazy, like you did. But worse even than you. He mostly curled up in a corner if they'd let him—he was no fun at all. He used to be brave, or so the other boys used to say, but not any more. He wouldn't even move if someone else didn't make him.”

Tommy paused, and laughed again. “But I could make him.”

Amy didn’t answer, didn’t move. But her silence didn’t stop him.

"I practiced on rats, Amy, and on birds. I could make them tear themselves with their claws. And so I thought, maybe _people_ would tear themselves too. So I gave Dennis a sharpened slat from under his bed. Can you guess what he did with it, what I made him do?”

Amy tried to stop herself from guessing; she did try. She screamed and sobbed. But no one came. No one would ever come again. They expected screams from her room.

“Can’t you guess, Amy? And you so bright?” Tommy laughed and laughed.

"No one can figure out how Dennis made himself a knife, or how such a pathetic, spineless nothing found the will to slash himself like that. He cut open his own belly, and he kept cutting and cutting. They figured it must have hurt terribly, but he never made a sound to alert them. Not one sound." His voice curled around her, as rich as a cat’s purring at spilled cream.

If she weren't restrained, she could at least have put her hands over her ears so she couldn't hear him. But she was bound; she could do nothing but lie there and listen to his laughter.

"Well, Amy, it's been fun talking to you. You're much more fun than Dennis ever was. I'll be back to visit you again."

She had screamed her throat raw by the morning. Her voice never entirely recovered, but that didn't really matter. She had mostly stopped making intelligible words by then, anyhow.

It was always dark now.

*  
  
_“They are horror stories and they have not happened to me, they have not yet happened to me, they have happened to me but we are detached, we watch our unbelief with horror...”_

“Hello, Amy, I’m back.”

 

She screamed, even knowing that no one would ever come.

 

“You’re my Muse, Amy, my inspiration,” Tommy whispered tenderly. "You’ve inspired me to kill another girl, you know. Another ugly bookworm with glasses, just like you. Another Muggle, really, although they called her a witch. But she wasn’t really, she was like you. But I'm keeping you alive for now, so I killed her instead. Have you noticed yet that you can't kill yourself? Have you tried? I don’t want you to. I won’t let you. I want to keep you alive. It's so much fun to talk to you. Don’t you enjoy our conversations? You're so smart, Amy. Everyone always said how smart you were. Do they say that now?"

Amy screamed and screamed. Or she tried to, with her ruined throat. She wasn’t sure, really, what sounds she was making, but Tommy laughed.

"I want to tell you how I killed her. You'll be interested, Amy; you’ve always liked mythology. And fairy tales. Shall I tell it like a fairy tale, Amy? Once upon a time—"

She screamed again. Tommy said petulantly, "Hush. You can't hear me tell the story if you're too noisy."

Her throat shut itself; she could hardly breathe through the sudden constriction. Tommy started again, "So. Once upon a time, a thousand years ago, there was a mighty wizard named Salazar Slytherin. He talked with snakes; he invented wondrous spells; he performed great and terrible deeds. He was the greatest wizard of his day, and he decided to share his wisdom. So he founded a school of wizardry, the first in all the land.

“But after a time things went wrong at the school. Lesser wizards who taught there wanted to share their knowledge with the unworthy. Salazar argued, but they wouldn't listen. So he shook the dust of that place from his feet, and he left them.

“But he left behind him a gift, sealed in a hidden chamber which could only be opened by his true heir. The Heir of Slytherin.

"A thousand years later, a boy was born: a special boy, a boy with great and terrible powers. He could talk to snakes as easily as people, and they told him their deepest secrets. His witch mother died at his birth, so he was reared amongst the unworthy. Amongst the rubbish we call Muggles, amongst the powerless, amongst the trash. But his true people finally found him and took him to be trained at Salazar's own school. There he was chosen for Salazar's own house, and there he found that talking to snakes was Salazar's own gift.

“And there he found his destiny. He was the Heir of Slytherin. He was the one Salazar's shade had been awaiting for so long, the one person brilliant and persistent enough to find, powerful enough to open, and bold enough to enter the Chamber of Secrets.

"Don’t you want to know what he found there, Amy?"

Amy shook her head, whimpering a little in her throat.

Tommy laughed again. "Of course you do, Amy! You can’t wait for me to tell you! Stop lying. The Heir of Slytherin found a creature you Muggles thought mythological. And it very nearly is; I'm the only living person who has ever seen it. So, the Heir of Slytherin entered Slytherin’s Chamber of Secrets, and he found there a Basilisk, the very King of Serpents. And he knew then what Salazar meant him to do: use the Basilisk to drive the unworthy, the impure, from Salazar’s school.

“And he started that worthy work, but he was interrupted. For by then Salazar’s school was controlled by those lesser wizards who wanted the impure to be taught. They didn’t want the King Serpent to roam free, to purify the school. The Basilisk killed one Muggle girl with its pure gaze, but the lesser ones threatened to close—to close!—the school if any more were killed. So Slytherin’s heir immured the King Serpent again and gave them a scapegoat, a nothing, to cast out in blame.

“But one day soon the Heir of Slytherin will control the school, the King Serpent will roam freely, and nothing impure will be allowed to sully the corridors of Slytherin’s school.

“There, Amy; don’t you like that story?”

Amy was sobbing. Was any of this true? But Tommy seemed so sincere in speaking of a purifying death.

How did a basilisk kill, in mythology?

With its venom, and with its gaze.

*

_“The voice comes through darkness and has no face.”_

 

“Hello, Amy, I’m back. I have such wonderful news—I found my family! Isn’t that what every orphan always wants? Didn’t you want that too; didn’t you think that it would be wonderful to find them? “

Amy whimpered feebly. Tommy laughed. “I know those books you used to read, Amy. How it’s supposed to be, when the orphan finds his true family. How he’s secretly of high birth, and his family is delighted to accept him, the long-lost heir. And I found them, I did find them, I tell you! My mother was from one of the oldest Wizarding families, now in decline. And I found that she—my mother—had been abandoned by my father when she was pregnant. She had had the poor taste to let herself want the local squire’s son, one of _your_ lot, one of the rubbish, one of the Muggles. She lowered herself, she brought herself actually to marry him. And then when he found out what his wife was, and that the child she carried would be better and more powerful by far than he—why then, that Muggle abandoned her to starve with her unborn babe. Wasn’t that mean, Amy? Don’t you think that that should be punished?”

She pushed against the restraints and tried to keep herself from crying again.

The voice had moved; now it came from across the room. “But isn’t that the same in all the tales, Amy? The mortal man marries a creature better, more powerful than he, and then rejects her when he finally realizes how—how outclassed he is. He can’t bear how much more powerful she is. The selkie wife, the Fay, Ulysses’ father…. If he can’t control her, he rejects her. And her child, his own son. Because he knows he must eventually be surpassed. By his own son.”

Tom’s voice turned silken smooth. “As he was. When I found him, the lost son come home to claim his heritage at last, he looked at me and gaped. He STARED at me. He knew who I was at once, and my grandparents too. They knew. And they weren’t surprised by what I did next. Afraid, but not surprised. They knew they deserved it.”

His voice sank. “Can you guess what I did, Amy?”

She refused to answer. He laughed. “Amy, you’re so smart, can’t you guess?”

_No!_

Tommy giggled. “You guessed exactly right, Amy. I killed them. All three of them. But here’s the best part, the part even you can’t guess. _Not with my own wand.”_

If her eyes had still worked she would have stared at him. He laughed yet again, richly. “Oh, yes, Amy. You’re so smart. What wand would I want to use? My mother’s own brother lived right near there, right nearby. He didn’t protect her; he let her throw herself at that Muggle. He wanted to kill those Muggles, but he didn’t have the nerve.

“So I gave him what he’d always secretly wanted.

“It was _his_ wand that punished that Muggle for looking on his sister. His wand that punished them all, for rejecting her when she was pregnant. And, best of all, he really does believe that he did it. I gave my uncle what he’d always wanted. Wasn’t that nice of me?”

Amy managed to scream until he raised his wand again, bored finally with her outbursts. This time his silencing proved to be permanent.

*

_“someone to watch him while he talks, with admiration and fear…”_

“Hello, Amy, I’m back. Did you miss me?”

She screamed, but no sound had come from her throat for years now. At least she thought it was years that she had spent in this mute darkness. Years during which she had wished, sickly, desperately, that he would not return—but had never quite dared to hope.

Now her foresight mocked her.

He was back.

Telling her what he’d seen, what he’d done, in that perversion of a Grand Tour.

He whispered things to her. He left, and returned, and whispered to her again.

He laughed when she tried to scream.

Sometimes he touched her throat, tenderly, where the screams vibrated that she could no longer voice.

*

_“This voice becomes her mirror.”_

At first he seemed to her just to be feeding off her terror and revulsion, enjoying himself. He liked explaining his darkest experiments to her, telling her exactly what differences he registered if he took a victim’s life-blood from the throat, heart, or groin. The difference between blood taken at the moment of death, before, or after. Between struggling victims and unknowing ones, or even the occasional consenting one.

“You’re so smart, Amy. What do you think of this, now?”

But after a time Amy noticed that something had changed. He had stopped just bragging about what he had done, and started whispering to her of various possible plans. Laying out alternatives. He laughed whenever he could make her visibly recoil.

But then afterwards sometimes he’d come back to gloat about how well his plans had gone—and it was always the worst, the scenario that she’d thought most terrible, that he would have enacted.

Finally Amy was able to pull into focus what it reminded her of: those long-ago visits to the optician getting her bottle-bottom lenses, back when she could see and her vision mattered. She remembered those grudged appointments, the relentless, impersonal drill: “Which is better, Miss Benson, which is clearer? This… or that? Choose.”

Flipping glass lenses over her eyes until she wanted to scream in frustration.

Tommy’s insistence was like the optician’s, equally implacable.

Forcing her to see clearly. Even when Amy didn’t want to. That’s what Tommy was doing.

He kept whispering horrors in her ear. “I could do this… or that.”

But the point was, the problem was, it seemed that the one she thought most terrible was what Tommy ended up doing.

He was using her to focus. To help him choose.

*

_“she was not a voice but a body and therefore finite”_

So Amy schooled herself to make her face a blank, to make her whole body as empty as her throat, no matter what Tommy whispered to her. She knew she was successful with everyone else; the attendants and the other inmates commented on how she had stopped responding to anything. But Tommy still came, and whispered, and laughed—and returned gloating with his reports.

Mind-reading wasn’t real; it only happened in stories or in nightmares.

But Tommy _was_ a nightmare.

It was the only explanation.

And he was reading _her_ to help him choose among evils.

This… or that. Like the optician. Coldly checking her response.

Tommy was using a blind, mute, crazy girl as his guide. Using her thoughts to help him decide what course to choose. Which was worst.

*

_“… a woman… who had seen down into the earth”_

Only it became plain, eventually, that Tommy wasn’t reading Amy’s _thoughts_ , exactly.

One time he asked her advice about torturing a baby to force the father to obey him. Amy had felt the full horror of the suggestion, but she had also thought, coldly, that if Tommy went too far the father would fling himself against him in a rage far past any possibility of Tommy’s being able to manipulate the man to his advantage.

And Tommy had come back to her, later, to taunt her with being wrong.

Only she hadn’t been. The poor man had flung himself at Tommy and gotten himself and his daughter safely killed.

That’s what her chilled mind had thought would happen; that’s what Amy had predicted if the man broke in despair.

But Amy’s heart had stilled earlier, shuddering, stopped on the image of the father’s torment

Her cold mind had been right, and Tommy had never even seen that.

Tommy had read her shuddering heart, her terror and pity and loathing. Only that.

Not her racing, terrible, impotent cold thoughts.

Was there some way that Amy could use that?

 

*

_“she must persuade this man at the end of the voice, this voice she has never seen and which has never seen her…”_

This… or that.

Which was better? Or, of course, the flip side of the lens, which was worse?

Like the optician. Just like the optician.

_Choose._

What was worse? But that wasn’t the question Tommy was using her to answer. Which _felt_ worse, was a slightly different question.

Could Amy learn to give him false responses, to mislead him?

Could she… cultivate her pain somehow? Her fear? Her despair, her futile flickering wishes for Tommy’s destruction? Project them, separated from what she coldly thought?

This… or that.

 

*

_“Everyone said he was a fool. Everyone said she was a clever woman. They used the word ‘ensnare’.”_

So Amy practiced during the long, dark days filled with other women’s screams.

She allowed herself to remember, very nearly, approaching Tommy shining in the slit, and her throat filled with the screams she could no longer voice. She let herself remember what he said about finding his father, and her mind filled with terrified disgust. She let herself imagine Tommy dead like Dennis, and she was filled with a rush of fierce, hot, perverted joy.

Amy practiced and practiced, calling up image after image, emotion after emotion. All terrible.

What else had she to do?

*

_“…this darkness…”_

Meanwhile Tommy came and whispered things. She couldn’t risk it until she was sure.

*

_“What was the temptation, the one that worked?”_

Finally she thought she might be ready. She started pushing selected images forward, gently, just a little. Then more, and more, as Tommy swallowed them whole.

First coupling her terror at the thought of him triumphing with the images of his worst excesses.

Then feeding him vague images of strong wizards abasing themselves in admiration and fear. _People respect a show of strength,_ she whispered mutely.

Slowly and subtly at first, she exaggerated her reactions to make Tommy lose his sense of balance, to lure him to indulge the immediate sweet gratifications of torture rather than his more calculated manipulations.

Image after image of atrocities, of people too cowed by terror to resist as he let himself loose to play, flavored with her own despair and revulsion at his projected easy triumph. All chosen to nourish the weakness he had unwisely shown her—that he’d choose horror over efficacy.

Amy’s sense of time was shaky by then, but it seemed that Tommy was coming to her more and more frequently, like a child who gets greedier for sweets the more he’s given.

More and more forcefully, Amy nursed and projected her own disgust and despair and dread, using it as a bait to entice Tommy to let slip his cold control over his worst impulses.

To let slip his grip on sanity.

In Amy’s mind, Tommy finally turned his wand even against his own followers, and Amy convulsed mutely at the images, and felt at him, insistently, that no one would ever dare thwart him again if he started doing so.

And she silently screamed and struggled in utmost horror whenever he told her he had done so. Feeding Tommy’s delusion that sheer fear could keep his followers loyal.

Nurturing, so carefully, his growing recklessness and madness.

*

_“A man may escape this death….”_

And then Tommy whispered in Amy’s ear of a Prophecy, and she thought, stunned and silent (her emotions carefully rioting elsewhere), of all the myths that Tommy had never troubled to learn. Of how, in all of them, trying to turn aside a prophecy led infallibly led to its fulfillment.

She filled her whole being with joy, relief, exultation. Someone to vanquish the Dark Lord was approaching! When Tommy growled in her ear that he’d stop the sodding hero, she let herself slump with lost hope. “The one,” she projected fiercely, desperately. “The _only_ one who can vanquish him… If Tommy can stop this one wizard, he’ll be invincible… Oh, please, no!”

Amy listened mutely for months as Tommy told her of trying to identify that mythical vanquisher. She kept projecting a sick fear that Tommy would succeed in identifying him, a bright and twisted hope that he would fail…. Images of Tommy’s death filled her, and Tommy stopped talking about toppling the Ministry while he searched with increasing obsession for clues to the One.

And then it turned out that the prophesied vanquisher was a _baby._

That was the easiest of all. Amy allowed delight at the image of a baby growing up to destroy Tommy to surge through her, followed by terror at the image of a baby dying before it could grow up. Tommy laughed at her terror, and laughed, and Amy let her emotions bloat and grow, horrible, unspeakable. A little baby, so vulnerable now…!

Tommy was laughing when he left her, and Amy knew he’d do it.

He’d try to kill the baby, and his strike would somehow destroy himself. That’s how prophecies always worked, and Tommy was too much the fool to realize it.

*

_"They both kept their promises."_

 

He didn’t come back. No one did.

There was an absence. Amy was an expert in absences by now: Sanity. Light. Life.

This absence of his was different from before.

When she finally let herself believe him gone, Amy laughed, and laughed, and laughed.

It didn’t matter that she could make no sound.

Of course, those watching thought her mad.

Amy laughed.

*

_“This is not fantasy, it is history.”_

 

“Hello, Amy. I’m back.”


End file.
